Ranking the top-40 goaltenders by Goals Allowed Per Expected Goal Against

I initially just calculated this for my own purposes and had no interest in starting a thread about it, but after seeing the results I felt like it was worth posting. The numbers pass the smell test even more so than I thought.

These are all the goaltenders to play at least 5,000 minutes over the past 3 seasons. This was just an arbitrary number that I picked and once I saw that exactly 40 goaltenders had played that number of minutes, I figured that number sounded about right.

The data used to calculate these numbers is from both Natural Stat Trick and Corsica.Hockey. For each model, goals against were divided by expected goals against. In order to combine the two models, goals against and expected goals against for each data set were added together. (Corsica's data set slightly varies from Natural Stat Trick's because Corsica is missing a few games and goals.)

The full data is here:


In my opinion, this is by far the best way to statistically evaluate goaltenders since it accounts for shot quality. Other metrics like GAA, SV%, Wins, etc. don't account for shot quality. Obviously these expected goal metrics aren't perfect but they do have a strong correlation between actual goals and the methodology behind them is solid.

In addition, I think that "goals allowed per expected goal" is the best way to describe and express this metric. Metrics like delta save percentage or GSAA are not quite as simple and do not explain themselves so clearly. "Goals allowed per expected goal" is a lot more simple IMO. For every 100 expected goals that your team allows, John Gibson allows only 85 goals, and Cam Ward allows 112. That is very easy to explain.

Obviously, if I were ranking goaltenders, my final list would be a little different from the list we have here. For example, factors like consistent performance under a heavier workload would lead me to rank Frederik Andersen over Philipp Grubauer, factors like playoff performance would lead me to rank Braden Holtby over Frederik Andersen, and factors like recency bias would lead me to rank Andrei Vasilevskiy over Martin Jones.

However, I still think the list is pretty damn good, and does a better job of ranking these goaltenders than most skater ranking metrics I've seen. Thoughts on the list?